Feast Your Ears on This: The Sounds of A Country Alive

While we all know the old adage, “don’t judge a book by its cover”, we know too that this proves easier said than done.  Our senses are trained to collect information, process it, and judge according to our previous life experiences.  When taking in a place for the first time, our sense of sight seems the most useful, as things you see are more simple to sort through and categorize.  We effortlessly recognize the familiar sites: a mother and her child, a person buying groceries, or a load of people travelling on a bus, and we achieve a degree of understanding about what’s happening, of where we are.

It’s the other senses, however, that color the picture and are much more difficult to grasp and interpret.  A new taste can be many things- good, bad, strange, familiar-all at the same time.  A smell can be both comforting and disagreeable, and a touch, a texture of a new place can be similarly bipolar.  The dryness of the soil is not the soil I know from home; the way people embrace and engage socially is not natural to me. Each element of the puzzle is just a piece and takes time and effort to put together.  But of all the senses, for me at least, it is the sense of sound that has shown itself to be the most complex. 

Unfamiliar sounds can do incredible things to your imagination.  A language unknown gives us almost no insight, aside from intonation, which isn't necessarily a tell-tale sign of the message.  (I've learned this here as I am often certain that two women are mere moments from clawing one another’s eyes out in anger only to begin laughing heartily and part ways seconds later.) #instinctfail.

A bump in the night in unfamiliar surroundings has the rare ability to excite an intense and immediate fear in a person-young and old alike.  (I learn and re-learn this almost nightly as I am wakened by a thump and lay still, heart pounding, awaiting certain death by any number of carnivorous bush mammals.)  Still other sounds leave too much room for imagination as they are so foreign, so unfamiliar, that we don’t know how to feel about them.  These are the sounds I want to share with you now.  {Dramatic Soap Opera Voice}

                                             

                                                 These are the Sounds of My Life

Living in a Muslim country, I've slowly gotten used to the chant, known as the “call to prayer” which happens five times daily.  A man's voice booms from the mosque, of which every single village has at least one, starting at 5 am and lasts a few minutes each “round”.  Now, factor in my not being much of a morning person with the proximity of my house to the speakers of the mosque, and you might imagine this is not my favorite sound.  You are correct.  However, it infuriates “startles” me less and less as time goes on, and I have actually come to enjoy the evening calls-to-prayer quite a bit.  It’s kind of magical taking a bucket bath under the stars, hearing the loud rhythmic chant, and listening as the villagers begin making their way to the mosque to pray. 

The next sound is a little less romantical.  It’s a sound I thought for sure I was imagining my first few weeks here; I thought it perhaps an auditory hallucination-a side effect of my Malaria prophylaxis..? Negative. It’s the superbly obnoxious “waaka waaka” of a clown horn.  Yes, the horn usually-if not exclusively-heard during a circus intermission.  This sounds comes through my windows, weather permitting, around 6 am.  You might imagine this is not particularly enjoyable.  You are correct.  But, it has been in my learning what this noise signifies that brings me joy.  It is the calling card of none other than...the fish delivery man!  A young teen boy rides his bike throughout the village while sounding his ridiculous horn, signaling the women to come out and buy their fish for the day.  Now, while I have continued to fantasize about stripping the horn from the bicycle and beating him with it violently, the vision is fleeting, as I am quickly overtaken with anticipatory elation at the prospect of having fish for dinner.    

Another sound of my new home is harder to describe.  Imagine holding a very heavy wooden ball and then dropping it into a deep wooden bowl.  It’s a rich, hollow, echo-y sound.  This noise fills every corner of the village at nearly every hour of the day. It’s the sound of countless women pounding grains into powders with a massive mortar and pestle.  Gambian food necessitates a lot of these powders for use in various sauces and porridges, so the women never cease to have things which require a good smash.  By the way-Gambian women, who do most of the heavy-lifting for their families, are total beasts.  They carry 15 pound buckets of water on their heads while lugging a 10 pound baby on their back, and they can pound the SHIT out of these grains.  In order to break up the monotony of the pounding, a variety of choreography has been created, which is done at random times or whenever the mood strikes.  This includes but is not limited to:

 1)   Pair Pounding:  Women work in tandem to create a see-saw motion of pounding.  This speeds things up  and adds the potential for socializing. Low degree of difficulty.

 2) Group Pounding: Similar to above, but with three or more women.  Higher degree of difficulty as timing can prove quite tricky. 

 3) Clap Pounding:  The exciting variation where one must drop the wooden club

down with such a force as to  cause it to bounce up and stay air-borne for enough time to clap their hands together before catching the  club on its way back down.  Highest degree of difficulty. 

You might imagine this all takes a great deal of practice and coordination, and that a cocky foreigner such as myself should be well advised against participating in such spectacles for fear of hurting themselves and others.  You are correct. 

All of these sounds have made up my world the last 7 weeks.  Together with the animals, the language, and the truly spectacular rainstorms, I have been surrounded with a cacophony of new noise.  While I do look forward to this noise becoming more familiar, I also revel in its oddness, because for me, oddness is one of the very best things.